Both/And
We’re accustomed to thinking about the US-Mexico border as an abstraction. A new book tries to find intimacy in it.
Two Sides of the Border Reimagining the Region edited by Tatiana Bilbao, Ayesha S. Ghosh, and Nile Greenberg. Lars Müller Publishers, 488 pp., $35
What is the border? Line. Crossing. Wound. During the last four years—six if we count the run-up to the 2016 election—Donald Trump framed the US-Mexico border as a referendum on nationhood, with rhetoric so toxic and policies so brutal that other discourses, other lived experiences, were eclipsed by the shadow of the promised wall. And then on January 20, President Biden halted all work on Trump’s fortified fence while the new administration reviews construction contracts.
With that pause, which is neither truly benign nor pious, a temporary lightness allows us to see what has been wrought: new photos of partially built sections of the barrier in southern Arizona (commissioned by Insider magazine) show natural landscapes blasted and scarred. Yet it is in this lull that other outcomes seem, if not possible, then worth summoning. Two Sides of the Border: Reimagining the Region, recently published by…
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